It seems to be almost a fact of nature that this sort of Zipfian distribution that you are seeing at social sites is true almost anywhere in nature. The size of lakes in Minnesota also follows this same distribution.. with a relatively small number of lakes holding the largest amounts of water.. and a long tail of small lakes each holding small amounts of water.

That said, just because something obeys a Zipf distribution does not necessarily make it un-democratic. Think about level of participation in the U.S. political arena. I'll bet it follows the same sort of distribution.. with a (relatively) small number of people heavily involved at a number of levels.. and a long tail of people who only vote in presidential elections, once every four years. (Or, if you live in Florida or Ohio.. a long tail of people who don't get to vote at all ;-)

Does that make the U.S. policial arena undemocratic? Yes, I agree that the long tail should shorten, and more people should move toward the head..and become more politically involved at all levels But it seems like an almost incontrovertible fact of nature that this won't happen. There will always be a fat head of relatively few but active players, and a longer tails of many, less active players. But that fact, by itself, doesn't make the system undemocratic.

What I am trying to say is that "true, free [and democratic]" must not necessarily imply "uniformly distributed", don't you think? Or do you feel that if something is not uniformly distributed, it is not democratic?

I agree, Jeremy. But, I think these folks also make the claim that these systems use everyone in the community with equal weight. For example, the very next sentence in Kevin's post is, "All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren't anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors."

It will be interesting to see how the composition of Digg will change over the upcoming years. What source will the next generation of hackers turn to? I'd be curious to know if there is a sizable overlap between Digg and Kuro5hin users (I don't think it's that big of a number).

Greg, yeah, even if folks are prominent, they're not always with it. I once asked Kevin Rose how he knew if Digg was "good" or not. I.e. how he did evaluation. He started to tell me about TREC/Cranfield-style evaluation for search engines. I replied that I already knew about all that (heh), and that it wasn't really relevant, since Digg wasn't providing an ad hoc retrieval service. So I asked him again how he did evaluation. He didn't really have an answer.

I think he thought I was funny to even ask the question. It was kinda this unspoken, "Uh, have you ever used Digg? Then you know that we're good."